Mrs. Hallam's companion

Front matter

*

POPULAR NOVELS

BY

Contents

Chapter Page

I. The Hallams 9

II. The Homestead 24

Chapter I. The Hallams

Mrs. Carter Hallam was going to Europe, — goingto Aix-les Bains, — partly for the baths, which she hoped would lessen her fast-increasing avoirdupois, and partly to join her intimate friend, Mrs. Walker Haynes, who had urged her coming and had promised to introduce her to some of the best people, both English and American. This attracted Mrs. Hallam more than the baths. She was anxious to know the best people, and she did know a good many, although her name was not in the list of the four hundred. But she meant it should be there in the near future, nor did it seem unlikely that it might be. There was not so great a distance between the four hundred and herself, as she was now, as there had been between Mrs. Carter Hallam and little Lucy Brown, who used to live with her grandmother in an old yellow house in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, and pick berries to buy herself a pair of morocco boots. Later on, when the grandmother was dead and the yellow house sold, Lucy had worked first in a shoe-shop and then in

MRS. HALLAM S COMPANION.

a dry-goods store in Worcester, where, attracted by her handsome face, Carter Hallam, a thriving grocer, had made her his wife and mistress of a pretty little house on the west side of the city. As a clerk she had often waited upon the West Side ladies, whom she admired greatly, fancying she could readily distinguish them from the ladies of the East Side. To marry a Hallam was a great honor, but to be a West-Sider was a greater, and when both came to her she nearly lost her balance, although her home was far removed from the aristo-' cratic quarters where the old families, the real West- Siders, lived. In a way she was one of them, she thought, or at least she was no longer a clerk, and she began to cut her old acquaintances, while her husband laughed at and ridiculed her, wondering what difference it made whether one lived on the east Or west side of a town. He did not care whether people took him for a nabob, or a fresh importation from the wild and woolly West ; he w’as just Carter Hallam, a jolly, easy-going fellow whom everybody knew and everybody liked. He was born on a farm in Leicester, where the Hallams, although comparatively poor, were held in high esteem as one of the best and oldest families. At twenty-one he came into the possession of a few thousand dollars left him by an uncle for whom he was named, and then he went to the Far West, roughing it with cowboys and ranchmen, and investing his money in a gold-mine in Montana and in lands still farther west. Then he returned to Worcester, bought a small grocery, married Lucy Brown, and lived quietly for a few years, when suddenly one day there flashed across the wires the news that his mine had proved one of the richest in Montana, and his lands were worth many times what he

'The hallaMs.

gave for them. He was a millionaire, with property constantly rising in value, and Worcester could no longer hold his ambitious wife.

It was too small a place for her, she .said, for everybody knew everybody else’s business and history, and, no matter how much she was worth, somebody was sure to taunt her with having worked in a shoe-shop, if, indeed, she did not hear that she had once picked berries to buy herself some shoes. They must go away from the old life, if they wanted to be anybody. They must travel and see the world, and get cultivated, and know what to talk about with their equals.

So they sold the house and the grocery and traveled east and west, north and south, and finally went to Europe, where they stayed two or three years, seeing nearly everything there was to be seen, and learning a great deal about ruins and statuary and pictures, in which Mrs. Hallam thought herself a connoisseur, although she occasionally got the Sistine Chapel and the Sistine Madonna badly mixed, and talked of the Paul Belvedere, a copy of which she bought at an enormous price. Whep they returned to America Mr. Hallam was a three times millionaire, for all his speculations had been successful and his mine was still yielding its annual harvest of gold. A handsome house on Fifth Avenue in New York was bought and furnished in the most approved style, and then Mrs. Hallam began to consider the best means of getting into society. She already knew a good many New York people whom she had met abroad, and whose acquaintance it was desirable to continue. But she soon found that acquaintances made in Paris or Rome or on the Nile were not as cordial when met at home, and she was beginning to feel disi couraged, when chance threw in her way Mrs. Walkei* Haynes, who, with the bluest of blood and the smallest of purses, knew nearly every one worth knowing, and ; it \X 7 as hinted, would for a quid pro quo open many fashionable doors to aspiring applicants who, without her aid, would probably stay outside forever.

The daughter and grand-daughter and cousin of governors and senators and judges, with a quiet assumption of superiority which was seldom offensive to those whom she wished to conciliate, she was a power in society, and more quoted and courted than any woman in her set. To be noticed by Mrs. Walker Haynes was usually a guarantee of success, and Mrs. Hallam was greatly surprised when one morning a handsome coupe stopped before her door and a moment after her maid brought her Mrs. Walker Haynes’s card. She knew all about Mrs. Walker Haynes and what she was capable of doing, and in a flutter of excitement she went down to meet her. Mrs. Walker Haynes, who never took people up if there was anything doubtful in their antecedents, knew all about Mrs. Hallam, even to the shoe-shop and the clerkship. But she knew, too, that she was perfectly respectable, with no taint whatever upon her character, and that she was anxious to get into society. As it chanced, Mrs. Haynes’s funds were low, for business was dull, as there were fewer human moths than usual hovering around the social candle, and when the ladies of the church which both she and Mrs. Hallam attended met to devise ways and means for raising money for some new charity, she spoke of Mrs. Hallam and offered to call upon her for a subscription, if the ladies wished it. They did wish it, and the next day found Mrs. Haynes waiting in Mrs. Hallam’s drawing-

THE HALLAMS.

room for the appearance of its mistress, her quick-seeing eyes taking in every detail in its furnishing, and deciding on the whole that it was very good.

“ Some one has taste, — the upholsterer and decorator, probably,” she thought, as Mrs. Hallam came in, nervous and flurried, but at once put at ease by her visitor's gracious and friendly manner.

After a few general topics and the mention of a mutual friend whom Mrs. Hallam had met in Cairo, Mrs. Haynes came directly to the object of her visit, apologizing first for the liberty she was taking, and adding :

“ But now that you are one of us in the church, I thought you might like to help us, and we need it so much.”

Mrs. Hallam was not naturally generous where nothing was to be gained, but Mrs. Haynes's manner, and her “ now you are one of us,” made her so in this instance, and taking the paper she wrote her name for two hundred dollars, which was nearly one-fourth of the desired sum. There was a gleam of humor as well as of surprise in Mrs. Haynes’s eyes as she read the amount, but she was profuse in her thanks and expressions of gratitude, and, promising to call very soon socially, she took her leave with a feeling that it would pay to take up Mrs. Hallam, who was really more lady-like and better educated than many whom she had launched upon the sea of fashion. With Mrs. Walker Haynes and several millions behind her, progress was easy for Mrs. Hallam, and within a year she was “ quite in the swim,” she said to her husband, who laughed at her as he had done in Worcester, and called Mrs. Haynes a fraud who knew what she was about. But he gave her

MRS. IIALLAm’s COMP ANIOnT all the money she wanted, and rather enjoyed seeing her “ hob-a-nob with the big bugs,” as he expressed it. Nothing, however, could change him, and he remained the same unostentatious, popular man he had always been up to the day of his death, which occurred about three years before our story opens.

At that time there was living with him his nephew, the son of his only brother, Jack. Reginald, — or Rex as he was familiarly called, — was a young man of twenty-six, with exceptionally good habits, and a few days before his uncle died he said to him :

“ I can trust you, Rex. You have lived with me since you were fourteen, and have never once failed me. The Hallams are all honest people, and you are half Hallam. I have made you independent by my will, and I want you to stay with your aunt and look after her affairs. She is as good a woman as ever lived, but a little off on fashion and fol-de-rol. Keep her as level as you can.”

This Rex had tried to do, rather successfully, too, except when Mrs. Walker Haynes’s influence was in the ascendant, when he usually succumbed to circumstances and allowed his aunt to do as she pleased. Mrs. Haynes, who had profited greatly in a pecuniary way from her acquaintance with Mrs. Hallam, was now in Europe, and had written her friend to join her at Aix-les-Bains, which she said was a charming place, full of titled people both English and French, and she had the entree to the very best circles. She further added that it was desirable for a lady traveling without a male escort to have a companion besides a maid and courier. The companion was to be found in America, the courier in London, and the maid in Paris ; “ after which,” she wrote, “ you will travel tout-a-fait en pri?icesse. The en

THE HALLAMS.

princesse appealed to Mrs. Hallam at once as something I altogether applicable to Mrs. Carter Hallam of New York. She was a great lady now ; Sturbridge and the old yellow house and the berries and the shoe-shop were more than thirty years in the past, and so covered | over with gold that it seemed impossible to uncover them ; nor had any one tried, so far as she knew. The Hallams as a family had been highly respected both in Worcester and in Leicester, and she often spoke of them, but never of the Browns, or of the old grandmother, and she was glad she had no near relatives to in- ; trude themselves upon her and make her ashamed. She was very fond and very proud of Reginald, who was to her like a son, and who with the integrity and common sense of the Hallams had also inherited the innate refinement and kindly courtesy of his mother, a Bostonian and the daughter of a clergyman. As a rule she consulted him about everything, and after she received Mrs. Haynes’s letter she showed it to him and asked his advice in the matter of a companion.

“ I think she would be a nuisance and frightfully in your way at times, but if fyfrs. Haynes says you must have one, it’s all right, so go ahead,” Rex replied, and ' his aunt continued :

“ But how am I to find what I want ? I am so easily imposed upon, and I will not have one from the city.

I vShe would expect too much and make herself too familr. I must h-ave one from the country.”

‘ Advertise, then, and they’ll come round you like es around honey,” Rex said, and to this suggestion his aunt at once acceded, asking him to write the advertisement, which she dictated, with so many conditions and requirements that Rex exclaimed, “ Hold on there.

MRS. HALLAM’s COMPANION.

You will insist next that they subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles, besides believing in foreordination and everything in the Westminster Catechism. You are demanding impossibilities and giving too little in return. Three hundred dollars for perfection ! I should say offer five hundred. ‘ The higher-priced the better ’ is Mrs. Walker Haynes’s motto, and I am sure she will think it far more tony to have an expensive appendage than a cheap one. The girl will earn her money, too, or I’m mistaken ; for Mrs. Haynes is sure to share her services with you, as she does everything else.”

He spoke laughingly, but sarcastically, for he perfectly understood Mrs. Walker Haynes, whom his outspoken uncle had called “ a sponge and a schemer, who knew how to feather her nest.” Privately Rex thought the same, but he did not often express these views to his aunt, who at last consented to the five hundred dollars, and Rex wrote the advertisement, whic*h was as follows :

“ Wanted,

“ A companion for a lady who is going abroad. One from the country, between twenty and twenty-five, preferred. She must be a good accountant, a good reader, and a good seamstress. She must also have a sufficient knowledge of French to understand the language and make herself understood. To such a young lady five hundred dollars a year will be given, and all expenses paid. Address,

“ Mrs. Carter Hallam, i

“ No. — Fifth Avenue, New York/

When Rex read this to his aunt, she said :

“ Yes, that will do ; but don’t you think it just as well to say young person instead oi young lady ? '

THE HALLAMS.

“ No, I don’t,” Rex answered, promptly. “ You want a lady, and not a person , as you understand the word, and I wouldn’t begin by insulting her.”

So the “ lady ” was allowed to stand, and then, without his aunt’s knowledge, Rex a$ded :

“ Those applying will please send their photographs.”

“ I should like to see the look of astonishment on aunt’s face when the pictures come pouring in. There will be scores of them, the offer is so good,” Rex thought, as he folded the advertisement and left the house.

That night, when dinner was over, he said to his aunt : “ I have a project in mind which I wish to tell you about.”

Mrs. Hallam gave a little shrug of annoyance. Her husband had been full of projects, most of which she had disapproved, as she probably should this of Rex, who continued :

“ I am thinking of buying a place in the country, — the real country, I mean, — where the houses are old-fashioned and far apart, and there are woods and ponds and brooks and things.”

“ And pray what would you do with such a place ?” Mrs. Hallam asked.

Rex replied, “ I’d make it into a fancy farm and fill it with blooded stock, hunting-horses, and dogs. I’d keep the old house intact so far as architecture is concerned, and fit it up as a kind of bachelor’s hall, where I can have a lot of fellows in the summer and fall, and hunt and fish and have a glorious time. Ladies will not be excluded, of course, and when you are fagged out with Saratoga and Newport I shall invite you, and possibly Mrs. Haynes and Grace, down to see the fox-hunts I

MRS. HALLAM’s COMPANION.

mean to have, just as they do in the Genesee Valley. Won’t it be fun ?”

Rex was eloquent on the subject of his fancy farm. He was very fond of the country, although he really knew but little about it, as he was born in New York, and had lived there all his life with the exception of two years spent at the South with his mother’s brother and four years at Yale. His aunt, on the contrary, detested the country, with its woods, and ponds, and brooks, and old-fashioned houses, and she felt very little interest in Rex’s fancy farm and fox-hunts, which she looked upon as wholly visionary. She asked him, however, where the farm was, and he replied :

“You see, Marks, who is in the office with me, has a client who owns a mortgage on some old homestead among the hills in Massachusetts. This mortgage, which has changed hands two or three times and been renewed once or twice, comes due in October, and Marks says there is not much probability that the old man, — I believe he is quite old, — can pay it, and the place will be sold at auction. I can, of course, wait and bid it off cheap, as farms are not in great demand in that vicinity ; but I don’t like to do that. I’d rather buy it outright, giving the old fellow more than it is worth rather than less. Marks says it is a rambling old house, with three or four gables, and stands on a hill- -side with a fine view of the surrounding country. The woods are full of pleasant drives, and ponds where the white lilies grow and where I can fish and have some small boats.”

“ But where is it ? In what town, I mean ?” Mrs. Hdllam asked, with a slight tremor in her voice, which, however, Rex did not notice as he answered ;

THE HALLAMS.

“ I don’t remember where Marks’s client said it was, blit I have his letter. Let me see.” And, taking the letter from his pocket, he glanced at it a moment, and then said, “ It is in Leicester, and not more than five or six miles from the city of Worcester and Lake Quinsigamond, where I mean to have a yacht and call it the Lucy Hallam for you. Why, auntie, it has just occurred to me that you once lived in Worcester, and Uncle Hallam, too, and that he and father were born in Leicester. Were you ever there, — at the house where father was born, I mean ? But of course you have been.”

Rex had risen to his feet and stood leaning on the mantel and looking at his aunt with an eager, expectant expression on his face. She was pale to her lips as she replied :

“ Yes, I was there just after I was married. Your uncle drove me out one afternoon to see the place. Strangers were living there then, for his father and mother were dead. He was as country mad as you are, and actually went down upon his knees before the old well-sweep and bucket.”

“ I don’t blame him. I believe I’d do the same,” Rex replied, and then went on questioning her rapidly. “ What was the house like ? Had it a big chimney in the centre ?”

Mrs. Hallam said it had.

“ Wide fireplaces ?”

“ Rather wide,— yes.”

“ Kitchen fireplace, with a crane ?”

“ I don’t know, but most likely.”

“ Little window-panes, and deep window-seats?”

“ I think so.”

“ Big iron door-latches instead of knobs ?”

MRS. hallam’s companion.

“ Yes, and a brass knocker.”

“ Slanting roof, or high ?”

“ It was a high gabled roof, — three or four gables, and must have been rather pretentious when it was new.

“ Rex,” — and Mrs. Hallam’s voice trembled perceptibly, — “ the gables and the situation overlooking the valley make me think that the place you have in view is possibly your father’s old home.”

“By Jove,” Rex exclaimed, “ wouldn’t that be jolly ! I believe I’d give a thousand dollars extra for the sake of having the old homestead for my own. I wonder who the old chap is who lives there. I mean to go down and see for myself as soon as I return from Chicago and we get the lawsuit off our hands which is taking all Marks’s time and mine.”

Mrs. Hallam did not say what she thought, for she knew there was not much use in opposing Rex, but in her heart she did not approve of bringing the longburied past up to the present, which was so different. The Homestead was well enough, and Leicester was well enough, for Hallam had been an honored name in the neighborhood, and Rex would be honored, too, as a scion of the family ; but it was too near Worcester and the shoe-shop and the store and the people who had known her as a working-girl, and who would be sure to renew the acquaintance if she were to go there. She had no relatives to trouble her, unless it were a certain Phineas Jones, who was so far removed that she could scarcely call him a relative. But if he were living he would certainly find her if she ventured near him, and cousin her, as he used to do in Worcester, where he was continually calling upon her after her marriage and reminding her of spelling-schools and singing-schools and

THE UALLAMS.

circuses which he said he had attended with her. How distasteful it all was, and how she shrank from everything pertaining to her early life, which seemed so far away that she sometimes half persuaded herself it had never been !

And yet her talk with Rex about the old Homestead on the hill had stirred her strangely, and that night, long after her usual hour for retiring, she sat by her window looking out upon the great city, whose many lights, shining like stars through the fog and rain, she scarcely saw at all. Her thoughts had gone back thirty years to an October day just after her return from her wedding-trip to Niagara, when her husband had driven her into the country to visit his old home. How happy he had been, and how vividly she could recall the expression on his face when he caught sight of the red gables and the well-sweep where she told Reginald he had gone down upon his knees. There had been a similar expression on Rex’s face that evening when he talked of his fancy farm, and Rex was in appearance much like what her handsome young husband had been that lovely autumn day, when a purple haze was resting on the hills and the air was soft and warm as summer. He had taken her first to the woods and shown her where he and his brother Jack had set their traps for the woodchucks and snared the partridges in the fall and hunted for the trailing arbutus and the sassafras in the spring ; then to the old cider-mill at the end of the lane, and to the hill where they had their slide in winter, and to the barn, where they had a swing, and to the brook in the orchard, where they had a water-wheel ; then to the well, where he drew up the bucket, and, poising it upon the curb, stooped to drink

Mrs. hallam’s companion.

from it, asking her to do the same and see if she ever quaffed a sweeter draught ; but she was afraid of wetting her dress, and had drawn back, saying she was not thirsty. Strangers occupied the house, but permission was given them to go over it, and he had taken her through all the rooms, showing her where he and Jack and Annie were born, and where the latter had died when a little child of eight ; then to the garret, where they used to spread the hickory-nuts and butternuts to dry, and down to the cellar, where the apples and cider were stored. He was like a school-boy in his eagerness to explain everything, while she was bored to death and heard with dismay his proposition to drive two or three miles farther to the Greenville cemetery, where the Hallams for many generations back had been buried. There was a host of them, and some of the head-stones were sunken and mouldy with age and half fallen down, while the lettering upon them was almost illegible.

“ I wonder whose this is ?” he said, as he went down upon the ground to decipher the date of the oldest one. “ I can’t make it out, except that it is seventeen hundred and something. He must have been an old settler,” he continued, as he arose and brushed a patch of dirt from his trousers with his silk handkerchief. Then, glancing at her as she stood listlessly leaning against a stone, he said, “ Why, Lucy, you look tired. Are you ?”

“ No, not very,” she answered, a little pettishly ; “ but I don’t think it very exhilarating business for a bride to be visiting the graves of her husband’s ancestors.”

He did not hunt for any more dates ajter that, but, gathering a few wild flowers growing in the tall grass.

the hallams.

he laid them upon his mother’s grave and Annie’s, and, going out to the carriage standing by the gate, drove back to Worcester through a long stretch of Woods, where the road was lined on either side with sumachs and berry-bushes and clumps of bitter-sweet, and there was no sign of life except when a blackbird flew from one tree to another, or a squirrel showed its bushy tail upon the wall. He thought it delightful, and said that it was the pleasantest drive in the neighborhood and one which he had often taken with Jack when they were boys ; but she thought it horribly lonesome and poky, and was glad when they struck the pavement of the town.

“ Carter always liked the country,” she said to herself when her reverie came to an end, and she left her seat by the window ; “ and Rex is just like him, and will buy that place if he can, and I shall have to go there as hostess and be called upon by a lot of old women in sun-bonnets and blanket shawls, who will call me Lucy Ann and say, ‘ You remember me, don’t you ? I was Mary Jane Smith ; I worked in the shoe-shop with you years ago.’ And Phineas Jones will turn up, with his cousining and dreadful reminiscences. Ah me, what a pity one could not bo born without antecedents !”

mks. hallam’s COMPANION*

Chapter II. The Homestead

It stood at the end of a grastey avenue or lane a little distance from the electric road between Worcester and Spencer, its outside chimneys covered with woodbine and its sharp gables distinctly visible as the cars wound up the steep Leicester hill. Just what its age was no one knew exactly. Relic-hunters who revel in antiquities put it at one hundred and fifty. But the oldest inhabitant in the town, who was an authority for everything ancient, said that when he was a small boy it was comparatively new, and considered very fine on account of its gables and brass knocker, and, as he was ninetyfive or six, the house was probably over a hundred. It was built by a retired sea-captain from Boston, and after his death it changed hands several times until it was bought by the Hallams, who lived there so long and were so highly esteemed that it came to bear their name, and was known as the Hallam Homestead. After the death of Carter Hallam’s father it was occupied by different parties, and finally became the property of a Mr. Leighton, who rather late in life had married a girl from Georgia, where he had been for a time a teacher. Naturally scholarly and fond of books, he would have preferred teaching, but his young wife, accustomed to plantation life, said she should be happier in the country, and so he bought the Homestead and commenced farming, with very little knowledge of what ought to be done and very little means with which to

'THE HOMESTEAD.

do it. Under such circumstances he naturally grew poorer every year, while his wife’s artistic tastes did not help the matter. Remembering her father’s plantation with its handsome grounds and gardens, she instituted numerous changes in and about the house, which made it more attractive, but did not add to its value. The big chimney was taken down and others built upon the outside, after the Southern style. A wide hall was put through the centre where the chimney had been ; a broad double piazza was built in front, while the ground was terraced down to the orchard below, where a rustic bridge was thrown across the little brook where Carter and Jack Hallam had built their water-wheel. Other changes the ambitious little Georgian was contemplating, when she died suddenly and was carried back to sleep under her native pines, leaving her husband utterly crushed at his loss, with the care of two little girls, Dorcas and Bertha, and a mortgage of two thousand dollars upon his farm. For some years he scrambled on as best he could with hired help, giving all his leisure time to educating and training his daughters, who were as unlike each other as two sisters w r ell could be. Dorcas, the elder, was fair and blue-eyed, and round and short and matter-of-fact, caring more for the farm and the house than for books, w r hile Bertha was just the opposite, and, with her soft brown hair, bright eyes, brilliant complexion, and graceful, slender figure, was the exact counterpart of her beautiful Southern mother when she first came to the Homestead ; but otherwise she was like her father, caring more for books than for the details of every-day life.